David Bentley Hart, in his Beauty of the Infinite, contrasts different conceptions of infinity, and how creation's relationship to God reflects that, in the following excepts :
Bach is the greatest of Christian theologians, the most inspired witness to the ordo amoris in the fabric of being; not only is no other composer capable of more freely developing lines or of more elaborate structures of tonal mediation (wheresoever the line goes, Bach is there also), but no one as compellingly demonstrates that the infinite is beauty and that beauty is infinite. It is in Bach's music, as nowhere else, that the potential boundlessness of thematic development becomes manifest: how a theme can unfold inexorably through difference, while remaining continuous in each moment of repetition, upon a potentially infinite surface of varied repetition.
And it is a very particular kind of infinity that is at issue, for which there is really no other adequate aesthetic model: Wagner's "infinite" melody (so called) consists not in unrnasterable variations but in the governing logic of motivic recurrences; Wagner's greatest achievements might almost be said to make audible a quintessentially Hegelian logic, in a music pervaded by the most voluptuous and luxuriant kind of metaphysical nostalgia, the "infinity" of its unbroken melodic flow being of the most synthetic variety, rationalized (or sublated) by an abstractable system of leitmotivs. Is any music more fated than that magnificent arch spanning the course from Siegfried's funeral processional to Brilnnhilde's immolation and the conflagration of the gods in Gotterdiimmerung?
In Bach's music, though, motion is absolute, and all thematic content is submitted to the irreducible disseminations that fill it out: each note is an unforced, unnecessary, and yet wholly fitting supplement, even when the fittingness is deferred across massive dissonances by way of the most intricate contrapuntal mediations. Nor are dissonances final, or ever tragic: they are birth pangs, awaiting the glory to be disclosed in their reconciliations - their stretti and recapitulations. Bach's is the ultimate Christian music; it reflects as no other human artifact ever has or could the Christian vision of creation.
Take for example the Goldberg Variations, in which a simple aria from the Anna Magdalena Notenbiichlein is stated, only to be displaced by a majestic sequence of thirty variations composed not upon it, but upon its bass line (a simple descent from the tonic to the dominant, G to D, scarcely material sufficient for a lesser talent), and in which every third variation is a perfect canon (the canonic refrain being lengthened at each juncture, so that the final two are canons upon the octave and upon the ninth). When at the end of this glittering, shifting, and varied series the aria is restated, it can no longer be heard apart from the memory of all the variations in which it has been reimagined: it has acquired a richness, an untold profundity, of light and darkness, joy and melancholy, levity and gravity; it is all its ornamentation and change. Or consider the massive, shatteringly profound Ciaccona at the end of the second Unaccompanied Violin Partita, whose initial theme is no more than four bars long, a bass phrase of absolute simplicity that is succes- sively reborn in sixty-four variations, passing from the minor, through the major, and back to the minor again, arriving at a restatement (with a few chromatic adornments at the end) that, again, contains all the motion, variety, and grandeur of what has gone before. One could imagine no better illustration of the nature of creation's "theme."
Creation's form - a departing theme, submitted to innumerable variations and then restored, immeasurably enriched - is too lively and splendid to be reduced to the helotry in which, for instance, the Hegelian epic of Geist would confine it: no ideal and accomplished music, no final resolution beyond the "negations" of music, brings creation to a "fulfilled" silence; Christian eschatology promises only more and greater harmony, whose developments, embellishments, and movement never end and never "return" to a state more original than music.
Creation's form - a departing theme, submitted to innumerable variations and then restored, immeasurably enriched - is too lively and splendid to be reduced to the helotry in which, for instance, the Hegelian epic of Geist would confine it: no ideal and accomplished music, no final resolution beyond the "negations" of music, brings creation to a "fulfilled" silence; Christian eschatology promises only more and greater harmony, whose developments, embellishments, and movement never end and never "return" to a state more original than music.
The analogy between God's and Bach's handiworks is audible chiefly in Bach's limitless capacity to develop separate lines into extraordinary intricacies of contrapuntal complication, without ever sacrificing the "peace;' the measures of accord, by which the music is governed. This is especially evident, of course, in the great fugues, particularly of the later years: a double, triple, or even quadruple fugue is never too dense for Bach's invention to comprise, to open up into ever more unexpected resolutions, nor does a plurality of subjects ever prove resistant to augmented, diminished, or inverted combinations.
Perhaps the most exquisite examples of this inventiveness are to be found in the second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier and in the Art of the Fugue, but one might look anywhere in his oeuvre: the very lovely Fugue in F Major (BWV 540), for instance, in which the two contrasted subjects come together in a third part where they appear together in five different intervals, until they arrive at the magnificent conclusion in which the treble restates the fugue's original motif; or, to take an example particularly appropriate to theological concerns, the great Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Major, Bach's "trinitarian" fugue, which is actually constructed from three fugues on three different subjects and in three different time signatures, the first (the "paternal") fugue's subject appearing in each of the other two in a rhythmically varied form, "generating" the second fugue and crossing, by way of a stretto, to the third. This is the pneumatological dynamism in Bach's music, so to speak, the grace that always finds measures of reconciliation that preserve variety; and so this is how it offers an aesthetic analogy to the work of the Spirit in creation, his power to unfold the theme God imparts in creation into ever more profuse and elaborate developments, and to overcome every discordant series.
....surely the Spirit, thus invoked, is a metaphysical mechanism, whose function is to delimit, rationalize, and unify all divergent series in some kind of Aufhebung. Such is a suspicion perhaps impossible finally to dispel, but for Christian thought, it is worth saying, the unity that the Spirit offers is of a radi- cally inventive kind: he is the creator Spiritus who brings about the terms he unifies, as the open exposition and wholly aesthetic expression of his love, the whole fullness of whose work is its only "meaning:' His presence is most definitely not the dialectical Ariadne's thread that is unwound through, and leads back out of, the labyrinth of history; he redeems creation's many lines not through negation or sublation, but by a musical accumulation, a restoration through further development and invention.
Because God is Trinity, and creation a song shared among the Persons, God is the context in which the polyphony of being is raised up, in which even silenced voices are preserved, and promised a restored share in creation's hymnody. As God is the "place" of what differs, all distance belongs to God's distance, all true creaturely intervals are "proportions" and "analogies" of his infinite interval, all created music partici- pates in his infinite music. The one voice with which God pronounces creation good is also the "irisating" voice of election, an address and a vocation that necessarily "analogizes" being, evoking from it its endless response, its polyphony; and so good is the theme imparted in creation that God desires it back, in the same generous measure with which it is given, sustained in its goodness as a beauty of which, still, only God is capable.
The Holy Spirit, as the perfection of God's love, the differing yet again of divine differentiation, and the delightful, outgoing, unbounded power of the divine life, always brings out of creation its "depth" of differentiation, calls forth the radiance of being's surface, causes difference to differ most profoundly within itself, and lends to all the inflections of the divine gift a vibrancy and particularity beyond any merely formal differentiation. As the third person, the superabundance of divine love, the for-itself, fullness, and joy of that love, he bestows a harmony that can never be anything but a free, "superfluous;' wholly fitting sequence of further developments. The Spirit is eternally turning the face of creation to the Father by conforming it to the Son, and thus creation is beautiful, and a gift restored.
Being is itself uneven for creatures, susceptible of a greater or lesser ap- prehension, recollection, and recovery of its theme; being itself is something lost in the privative measures of sin and progressively recovered in receiving anew the measure of charity.
It is the music of harmonious differentiation, which is infinitely fulfilled in the trinitarian perichoresis, and which, in creation, can be lost, forsaken, or belied. In sin, all intervals become disordered; desire is directed no longer toward the infinite horizon of this unfolding music, but seeks to introduce its own caesurae into being, to enclose itself, to possess itself as force rather than as a participation in creation's polyphonic intricacies.
Creation is a diaphoral economy, an unending action of communi- cation, and there are innumerable levels of beauty within its intervals: degrees of interiority and exteriority, folds, intense arrays of specular surfaces and, then again, interludes of shadow or limpidity; but what is enfolded, ultimately, is that thematic or analogical content that mediates one interval to another.
....surely the Spirit, thus invoked, is a metaphysical mechanism, whose function is to delimit, rationalize, and unify all divergent series in some kind of Aufhebung. Such is a suspicion perhaps impossible finally to dispel, but for Christian thought, it is worth saying, the unity that the Spirit offers is of a radi- cally inventive kind: he is the creator Spiritus who brings about the terms he unifies, as the open exposition and wholly aesthetic expression of his love, the whole fullness of whose work is its only "meaning:' His presence is most definitely not the dialectical Ariadne's thread that is unwound through, and leads back out of, the labyrinth of history; he redeems creation's many lines not through negation or sublation, but by a musical accumulation, a restoration through further development and invention.
Because God is Trinity, and creation a song shared among the Persons, God is the context in which the polyphony of being is raised up, in which even silenced voices are preserved, and promised a restored share in creation's hymnody. As God is the "place" of what differs, all distance belongs to God's distance, all true creaturely intervals are "proportions" and "analogies" of his infinite interval, all created music partici- pates in his infinite music. The one voice with which God pronounces creation good is also the "irisating" voice of election, an address and a vocation that necessarily "analogizes" being, evoking from it its endless response, its polyphony; and so good is the theme imparted in creation that God desires it back, in the same generous measure with which it is given, sustained in its goodness as a beauty of which, still, only God is capable.
The Holy Spirit, as the perfection of God's love, the differing yet again of divine differentiation, and the delightful, outgoing, unbounded power of the divine life, always brings out of creation its "depth" of differentiation, calls forth the radiance of being's surface, causes difference to differ most profoundly within itself, and lends to all the inflections of the divine gift a vibrancy and particularity beyond any merely formal differentiation. As the third person, the superabundance of divine love, the for-itself, fullness, and joy of that love, he bestows a harmony that can never be anything but a free, "superfluous;' wholly fitting sequence of further developments. The Spirit is eternally turning the face of creation to the Father by conforming it to the Son, and thus creation is beautiful, and a gift restored.
Being is itself uneven for creatures, susceptible of a greater or lesser ap- prehension, recollection, and recovery of its theme; being itself is something lost in the privative measures of sin and progressively recovered in receiving anew the measure of charity.
It is the music of harmonious differentiation, which is infinitely fulfilled in the trinitarian perichoresis, and which, in creation, can be lost, forsaken, or belied. In sin, all intervals become disordered; desire is directed no longer toward the infinite horizon of this unfolding music, but seeks to introduce its own caesurae into being, to enclose itself, to possess itself as force rather than as a participation in creation's polyphonic intricacies.
Creation is a diaphoral economy, an unending action of communi- cation, and there are innumerable levels of beauty within its intervals: degrees of interiority and exteriority, folds, intense arrays of specular surfaces and, then again, interludes of shadow or limpidity; but what is enfolded, ultimately, is that thematic or analogical content that mediates one interval to another.
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